I don’t know how many of you took programming in college (or were lucky enough to take it in high school). Do you remember having the task of programming elevators for optimal performance? You know given X elevators and Y floors you need to figure out the best place to put the elevators and the best way to move them around. I had this experience when I was learning C++.
The storage nerds know that it could be compared to positioning heads on a set of hard drives. When I got back to my room today following VMware PEX it hit me. This will be coming back into play soon but probably not like many think. I foresee it coming into play with the cloud. It won’t be for storage anymore it will be efficiently positioning your work load in the cloud.
Where should my app be in the cloud to give my users what they need when they need it? I might have great performance in one place but because of other constraints my consumers of the cloud don’t get the benefits. However if I position the load in a slightly different location all the sudden my users will be able to gain immense performance benefits.
Why? Because we moved the elevator to a better floor. It might not seem like this flys in what we have been taught. Right now everyone is racing to the cloud. They just want to get there. Right now it seems to me it’s who can provide the best spec’s leaving the cloud. Not who can provide the best end user experience from their cloud.
I think in 2 to 3 years this will be the position many are clouds are trying to find. The cloud that positions its workloads in relation to its consumers is the one that’s going to drive the market space. It will not be the one that may be fast but cannot effectively position its self to allow consumers to have the best experience.
So I predict that you will see a rebirth of this logic in the near future as cloud providers position themselves and their clouds so that even though it’s not the fastest cloud it’s the best cloud for what you need as a consumer of cloud services. Just ask Otis!
Make it a happy day,
Tony
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[…] Storage in a new and unique way like a multidimensional array. Building off my earlier post of elevator to the cloud, it might be possible to make storage much more efficient. Instead of just two dimensional storage […]